


Strong at the Broken Places

by Sroloc_Elbisivni



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Possibly Pre-Slash, Prosthetics, Whump, off-screen amputation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 11:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7220098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/pseuds/Sroloc_Elbisivni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wash loses a lot when the Mother of Invention crashes. The Director never passes up an opportunity to experiment.</p><p>Or:</p><p>“Uh, guys?” Tucker calls. “His armor isn’t coming off.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strong at the Broken Places

**Author's Note:**

> or @goodluckdetective‘s challenge “Welcome to the Multiverse.”
> 
> THANK YOU STEPH FOR BRAINSTORMING STUFFS I OWE YOU LOTS
> 
> Two notes: this whole thing, from conception to completion, took seven hours and 20 minutes and I am very proud of both that and the fact that the title of this doc is RvB Wash Pain AU. ~~and the title is a quote from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms because I’m a horrible person sorry~~

“I still think this is a bad, bad, idea,” Tucker mutters, fumbling for the catches under the Freelancer’s helmet.  

“So why are you going along with it, Blue?”

“Because even I’m not that heartless, okay? Besides. I refuse to be on Blue team with just Caboose. He’d smother me with hugs inside a week.” The helmet comes off easily enough, and the dude’s face has more freckles than Tucker ever expected to see on a badass secret agent. He moves onto the greaves while Sarge and the Reds work on hauling the armor off of Church’s robot body—a job Tucker was more than happy to abdicate.

One small problem—the greaves and gloves won’t come off, no matter what he does.

He tries the left, then the right, then the left again.

“Uh, guys?” Tucker calls. “His armor isn’t coming off.”

“What?” Sarge booms, striding over. “Clearly, you’re even more incompetent than I thought, Blue! Let me show you how a real soldier does it.” He grabs the gloves and tugs. “ _Hnngh._ ”

The discarded gray helmet lying in the snow starts to beep an alarm. “ _Warning. Warning. Prosthetic sustaining damage. Further attempts to remove armor will result in inhibition.”_

“What the hell?” Tucker mutters, picking up the helmet. What he can see of the HUD is displaying a medical schematic of a suit of armor. “Hey, Doc. Come look at this!”

The useless purple medic makes several “hmm” sounds as he tries on the helmet. “Well. from what I can tell, it looks like a design to forcibly integrate a prosthetic with a suit of armor. That seems nasty. It would make the armor impossible to remove.”

“Oh.” The penny doesn’t so much drop as zing Tucker in the head. “ _Shit._  Sarge!”

“Just one good yank— _sweet mother of cornbread!_ ” Tucker spins around just in time to see the agent convulsing with electricity. 

“Okay,” Tucker says, after the seizing ends and Washington’s body is once again lying limp in the snow. “New plan.”

* * *

The new plan involves spray paint uh, borrowed, from the base and kicking lots of clean snow around to hide the spray-painted slush. It works pretty well. 

They make it to an abandoned Blue base, and dump the now-unconscious Freelancer in a spare bunk for the night. Tucker ends up hiding all the weapons and ammo as a precaution. 

It turns out to be a very good thing when he comes into the kitchen the next morning to find Washington digging through the cupboards and muttering. 

“Looking for something?”

The Freelancer jerks around and steps forward menacingly. “Where did you put my weapon?”

“What, are you planning to kill us all in our sleep?” 

“ _No_. I’m leaving.”

“Uh, dude, no you’re not. We couldn’t take off your armor to check for injuries, so the least you can do is stay here so we can keep an eye on you.”

He looms over Tucker menacingly. “I have a healing unit that can fix my injuries. Give me my  _gun._ ”

Tucker is suddenly feeling very, very naked without armor, but he just turns around and yells, “ _Caboose!”_

He turns back to the stubborn agent. “Either you’re healed enough to leave, which means you’re healed enough for Caboose to give you a hug, or you’re still internally injured. Which one is it?”

Caboose, the reliable son of a gun, comes bounding down the hall. “Yes, Tucker?”

Tucker gives Wash a significant look. 

The agent, expression unreadable behind his helmet, turns around and stalks over to the table, dropping dramatically down into a chair.

A chair that promptly breaks under the weight of his armor, leaving him sitting on the floor in the middle of the wooden wreckage. 

* * *

“Okay. Time to get some answers. What the fuck is up with your suit, dude?”

Wash, helmet off, stares at the table, expressionless. “During the Project, there was a…problem. A ship I was on crashed. I lost my right arm, and they replaced it with a prosthetic that bonded to the armor. I wasn’t really in a state to object at the time.

“The suit has waste disposal systems that recycle my dead skin cells and…other stuff. The helmet is the only element that’s removable without the codes they keep—kept—at the project for medical emergencies.”

“Whoa, hold up a sec,” Tucker interrupts. “So they have to remove the armor whenever you’re seriously injured?”

“Yeah, the healing unit isn’t always enou–” Washington cuts himself off, realizing the hole he’s in.

“Oh my fucking  _god_. You are a lying liar who lies.” 

Doc passes the guilty-looking agent a glass of orange juice. “But weren’t you in prison? Out of Freelancer?”

“The codes that they used to remove the armor were lost in the same EMP that took out the AI facility. Since I was just a prisoner, and the procedure to remove the armor would be expensive and time-consuming, they didn’t bother. It was supposed to be part of the deal if I brought back the Epsilon AI. Now I can’t get off the armor without taking off the arm, and I can’t take off the arm without getting out of the armor. And when I try, I get electrocuted.”

There was silence around the table. 

“Wow. Dude. That sucks. “

“…thanks.”

* * *

The crash on Chorus is bad. Epically bad. About the only thing that can be said for it is that Wash doesn’t lose a limb. 

They’ve been stranded in the valley for a month when Tucker wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep.

For lack of anything better to do, he pulls on his armor and grabs his sword and heads outside. 

Wash’s silhouette is visible up on the radio tower, and since there’s nothing else to do, Tucker climbs up and sits next to him. 

Wash’s helmet turns in his direction. “Tucker. I’m glad you’re here.” His voice sounds a little bit muzzy, like he just woke up.

“Uh, thanks?” Well that’s…gratifying.

“I need you to cut my arm off.”

“Dude! What the fuck,  _NO!_  I’m not cutting your fucking arm off!”

“Your sword is the only thing we have around that can actually go through the armor and the prosthetic arm. Once the arm is off, the electrical system will shut down and I’ll be able to take the rest off. The pain receptors should hopefully shut down quickly.”

That’s  _way_  too disturbingly coherent. “Wash. You haven’t…like…thought about this a lot. Right?”

“Of course.” He sounds kind of puzzled and dazed. 

Tucker does not have the energy to deal with this at buttfuck in the morning. “Look, just—just go back to bed.”

“What’s the point? I can just lie down here and feel the exact same way.” Wash holds up a hand against the moonlight and wiggles his fingers. “I want this armor off. I want to shower. I want to sleep in a bed. I want to be able to…to  _feel_  something for once. I’m so  _tired._ ” His voice cracks in a pathetic way. “Carolina, when we were hunting the Director…she thought that Epsilon might be able to override the lockdown on the armor. I didn’t—I didn’t want to test it, I couldn’t—couldn’t do that again. But if he was here, right now…”

“Wash.” Tucker has no idea what happened with Epsilon, but he knows it was bad. “Please. Go to sleep.”

“I…” His voice cracks again. “I don’t…”

Tucker carefully holds Wash by the soldier and pulls him back until he’s lying on the ground, then lies down next to him. “Go to sleep.”

Armor is really uncomfortable to sleep in. Tucker wakes up the next morning with cricks in a million different places.

He wonders if Wash’s super-special fancy armor is more comfortable. 

He doubts it. 

* * *

Tucker has nightmares a lot when he’s with the New Republic.

They don’t end when he wakes up, either, because his waking mind is even better at thinking up all the ways Wash could be hurt. 

They wouldn’t have to  _do_  anything. If he was badly enough hurt during the fight, so his healing unit wasn’t enough, he could die without them doing a thing. If they try to force his armor off, the constant electrocuting could kill him. If they  _do_  manage to force his armor off, then they have plenty of other ways to hurt him. 

The only time Tucker can make his thoughts shut up is when he trains enough to collapse where he’s standing. 

He falls asleep in his armor a lot more than he used to. It never gets any more comfortable. 

* * *

After the fight at the control tower with Locus, Tucker passes out and wakes up in an unfamiliar infirmary. He doesn’t get long to blink blearily up at the dark ceiling and wish for painkillers before the door swings open. 

A dude backlit by hallway lights and leaning on a crutch is standing in the doorway. 

“Hide me. Please.”

Tucker waves a hand in a vaguely permissive way and the guy wastes no time hobbling to the other side of Tucker’s bed and lying down on the floor with a groan. 

Fifteen seconds later, Donut pokes his head in the doorway. “Oh, heyyyyyyy Tucker! How are you? Have you seen Wash?”

“Uh. Stabbed. Nope.” He blinks. “Wait, why would he be in the infirmary?”

But Donut’s already gone. 

“Is he gone?”

“Yup.” Tucker is still half-asleep and on  _some_  kind of drugs, so it takes him a sec to put the pieces together. “Wait, holy shit,  _Wash?_ ”

He pushes himself over to the edge of the bed to see Wash, on the floor, turn over and grin up at him. “Hey, Tucker.”

And then, of course, his eyes roll back up in his head and he passes out.

Tucker leans way over the side of the bed and swats him in the face. “Wash. Wash.  _Wake up._ ”

Wash blinks and shakes his head. “M’awake. Oh. Hey, Tuck—look out!” 

Tucker loses the battle with gravity and starts sliding off the bed. His stab wound pulls in a very painful way. “ _Aah!”_

“Whoa!” Before he can fall any further, there’s a strong arm propping him up. “Easy, there.” 

Through a combination of swearing, teamwork, and frantic grasping at sheets (bow chicka bow wow) Tucker finally gets resettled in bed without pulling his stitches. 

“Dude, get up here, let me look at you.” Tucker pats the bed and watches Wash as he settles himself next to Tucker’s leg. There’s a brace around his left ankle and bandages on his good arm, but otherwise he looks okay. 

He even has a fancy shiny prosthetic arm that Tucker kinda wants to poke. 

Mostly, though, Tucker just wants to stare at this new fully-revealed Wash. Even while wincing in pain every so often, he looks relaxed and loose and… _happy_.

“Look at you, man.” Tucker pokes him lightly in the chest to make sure that he’s real. “All out of armor and everything! What happened?”

“Doctor Grey’s a miracle worker. She performed the operation that finally got it off when we were with the Federal Army.” He snorts. “She probably would have taken if off while I was unconscious the first time, but she said she was trying out respecting patient autonomy. I told her to go for it. She got the old one off, made me this—” He clenches the fist to demonstrate. “And now I can take my armor off.” He grins, actually fucking  _grins,_ and Tucker isn’t sure whether he wants to invest all his energy into making sure that Wash never stops grinning for the rest of his life or use it trying to punch the Director’s ghost in the face. 

“That is  _awesome,_  dude, congrats.” He holds up his fist for a fist-bump, and Wash reciprocates. “Wait, why are you hiding from Donut?”

The smile slides off Wash’s face and he buries his face in his hands with a frustrated groan. “He and Sarge keep trying to  _hug_  me.”

Tucker doesn’t stop laughing until Wash hits him in the face with a pillow. 

“Alright, alright. It’s not that funny,” Wash grumbles. 

“It’s  _hilarious._  Look, just stay in here, I’ll protect you from the big bad huggy Reds.”

“Thanks. You’re a real gentleman.” But he settles down when Tucker scooches over and they both manage to get arranged with a minimum of injury and a maximum amount of human contact. In the process, Tucker manages to notice that Wash has really nice abs. He kinda wants to lick them. 

But he’s also warm and as comfortable as he’s going to get with a stab wound and falling asleep so he just files that thought under ‘deal with later.’


End file.
